I have one hero that I did change gear on but not spells. The gear change was partly due to better gear being handed out in 0.36. It’s a Shaman and is still my most effective.
There’s not much choice on the matter, at least regarding Gear. The rules of the game universe changed in 0.36 to mandate this. Regarding spells, somewhat, but nowhere near as significant as the gear changes. Mana costs went up, but not the functionality of spells. The end result is generally an additional delay in starting the looping process, which does not mandate significant changes from a player’s 0.35 spell loadout.
I have this great idea for a gear loadout that I would love to try out. But, as I have not seen the appropriate Epic relics show up in the Shop or in a Challenge for two weeks and counting, the gear is rotting in my inventory.
And this is where, I believe, that the free gear handed out to players with 0.36 hurt players more than helped. Players were able to advance solely on the strength of the free Runic Mace handed out and were able to ignore armor/gear requirements, until the mace couldn’t one-shot things anymore. At that point, the iron wall slammed into unprepared players hard. In 0.36, a high-rarity weapon >>>>>>>>>>>> all other gear. The gap is that large IMO.
I can say that gear is appropriately balanced to the content that needs it. That said, high-rarity gear is all but completely inaccessible for players to engage with that content outside of winning the RNG jackpot, hence the frustration all over the in-game chat and here on the forums.
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" Don’t sell us an outhouse and tell us it’s the Taj Mahal "
See my post above please…
and know that I feel that I must now add more issues and perspective here and this will be hard for me to seperate these multiple subjects. I will also address the shortsightedness of the potential usefulness of the given-away .36 Epic items only in respect to the game goals High lvl Story/Sidestory and the ability to easily repeat successful Lvl X Dungeons/Skirmishes in PVE…
There is a miserably unmistakable Dominance of nearly negligible impact, low percentage, and incredibly niche loot items that come in 1 of 5 Random Element Types.
The sad lottery math (without including any Spells) is : 15 Gear sets × 12 Item types × 5 Element types = 1 in 900 pulls you will theoretically get 1 item Exactly that you are hoping for.
Also, The Devs audaciously pulled the rug out from under EVERY player
when they made needing multiple copies useless.
Players can pay real money for ( as in Crowns ) for in the ingame store. You can also try to get the item that you want randomly from their valuable time spent earning loot boxes but…
New players will be at a great disadvantage now…
even if they are given the (mostly not sought after… except Elven Charm/Jeweled Glove ? ) update .36 Epic items ( some of which are Bugged ) to start out with.
Are those Epic items alone enough to beat the highest Lvl PVE ? With comfortable ease… No. Elven Charm was essentially nerfed by .36 from the many Spell Mana cost increases…
If new players knew what they would be in for as of .36, would they even play this current game or would they choose a less Time-sucking, more fun and rewarding game ?
Imagine, now, that you are aware of all of this that and that you are a new player starting with very, very little… Would you endure, 1 to 5 Characters worth of the Ordeals of beating every Story mode and all the Sidestories and invest the time and money to achieve a Gear loadout to slowly and comfortably beat the highest Lvl. Dungeons/Skirmishes in PQ3’s current and difficult, Time-sucking gamestate ?
Thank you very much for considering all of this and I truly wish that the Devs will understand what is at stake for us all and that they could have a game with 100,000 or 1,000,000 players, as many other games do, if they listen to good advice and change this game for the good of us all. They will decide their fate but we need to speak truth to them and hope to bring us all positive change.
I hope that you choose the path to a 1,000,000 + player base. Do you hope so, like I do ?
I suspect those hurting the most are the brand new players who must now try to beat the story with inflated enemies but without any of the free Epic gear to help adjust.
I know in my first playthrough, despite hitting L50 around Ch12, and so forfeiting all the XP earned from then until story completion, I didn’t find any gear higher than Rare and I’d opened just about every chest I found. Granted that was entirely during 0.35 where evolving gear was also impossible. Atleast new players can get relics, even if the odds of finding the ones you need is at the mercy of the RNG, store and daily challenges being a level you can beat.
If players have to rely on what they can find and upgrade during a first playthrough I think a lot will struggle to beat the story mode now with max Rare level gear. They certainly won’t be running optimal prefixes in each slot, or the best mana colours in each piece, it will be luck of the drop random gear.
Unlike 0.35, it’s not feasible to complete a first playthrough with Rare max rarity gear, if not all-but-completely impossible.
There is a very significant difficulty spike in Chapters 14 and 15, that most players bypassed via stun-looping in 0.35. Without stun-looping, the difficulty of the final dungeon was tuned to the level of a full set of Epic Gear/Spells (which was the 1870 gear score of the dungeon). In 0.36, the final chapter was re-tuned to be even harder, which is now tuned to a gear score of 2210. This equates to just under half-and-half Epic and Legendary gear.
I can’t fathom a player having sufficient damage output to be able to address the final chapter without possessing a Legendary weapon in 0.36.
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If they plan the final chapters to be so high then I think they need to reconsider locking the Citadel behind story completion and instead just unlock it on reaching L50.
Otherwise new players are stuck in a catch-22. They can’t beat the story without gear that realistically they cannot find, earn or upgrade to in anything close to the time it takes to reach L50. And when they do go grinding for better gear, any XP they earn in excess of L50 just disappears instead of going towards Citadel upgrades that could help them beat the story.
Maybe it was just my assumption, but I figured the story mode was something to work through levelling up, and then the grind towards “perfect gear” starts with Dungeons I-X, tackling progressively harder dungeons and skirmishes for higher % chances of rarer loot.
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I wonder if the epic drops will become sidequest/story/level up rewards to be drip feed to new players along the first quest run through
E.g. Level 40 give reward of an Epic runic mace, or a sidequest in Chapter 13 etc.
We might be talking about different things, in terms of balance of gear. So I’m listing just a handful of items, that I feel are not balanced to 36. (there are probably more) All of the flat mana bonus gear, would arguable fit in the list also. I left them out, because I think we are going to see some more balancing with spells and don’t want things swinging wildly around. But these on the list are pretty uninspiring in 36.
Guard’s Armor: Gain 10/20/30/40 Armor when matching 5 or more gems
Dwarven Boots: Gain 10/25/40/55 Armor when you make 5+ matches in a turn
Dragonguard Spaulders: Gain 25/50/75/100 Resistance for each color accessory
Serpentine Pants: Gain 5/10/15/20 Armor the when you cast a green spell
Jeweled Pants: Add 2/4/6/8 to Armor when you create a big yellow gem
Bone Leg Armor: Gain 10/20/30/40 Armor when matching Skulls
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I finished my first playthrough (necro) right before they nerfed using multiple copies of spells and off class spells. By the last two chapters I had primarily rare gear with a 2 or 3 epics. It was brutally hard even under those conditions!
I’m only saying this to underline your point. An already very difficult first play through, is now an impossible first playthrough. When you add in the derth of drops, derth of shards, the need to do all playthroughs to have a chance at decent level followers? Yikes. I would not want to be new.
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@Lyrian I have to agree with both of what you have said here. A new player is going to be severely unable to be the story as is.
If a class is introduced, I may be able to squeak by a win but that would only be because I have a nice amount of epic and legendary gear already, but none of that would be tuned to a new class color.
Also I just want to point out the other major limiting factor for players of even extremely high level, which is weapon shards and glyphs are next to nonexistent.
The new feedback loop almost requires legendary weapon, but I have so far in all my time playing seen a total of 1 weapon glyph, which was priced at roughly $25 and you need 2…
Hopefully in .37 there is a more meaningful way to aquire glyphs outside of the paid battlepass.
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I can only hope adjusting these was overlooked with the 0.36 update.
Gaining 20/30 Armor when your overall health was only a few hundred, was a meaningful gain in protection. It wouldn’t protect a full hit, but add a bit of survivability and could stack up over a battle.
Now with most stats increased approx tenfold, player health being 2k+, enemy health in the tens of thousands and striking for multiple thousands of points of damage… +20 Armor is a trivial amount. Even causing it to proc multiple times in the now greatly extended battle times is still virtually worthless considering the enemy will strike back with a melee attack vastly more powerful each round they aren’t stunned.
While the items with static values such as these got left behind with the update, those awarding % related bonuses are much more useful as they did scale with the change. 10% of damage is still 10% of damage, just the damage also happened to increase hugely along with it.
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Hey team, here with a quick update on this.
Our team is looking into this now. We are pulling data to observe the amount of time taken in each battle, and we can see that the battles in daily asks do take longer at higher levels. We have a few ideas on how we can reduce this time, and will be experimenting on our end to find the best solution.
Any additional feedback or notes that you can offer will greatly help us with this process. Thank you in advance!
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Add a way to force end timer.
Add a way to skip animations.
Add a citadel reset feature.
Balance the game instead of making the balance worse.
Make ascending to legendary and mythic less impossible.
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Scale spells to match weapons
Add a “Remove animations” - not just for battles but for opening chests etc.
There is a lot of time in the game spent watching the same animation over and over and after a while this is not fun or new
Perhaps something that could be unlocked once the main questline is finished and you have a Level 50 character
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There has been a large decline in player retention and player happiness (.36 in large part but also from past changes and ongoing concerns)…
Although we would all be grateful for massive change that would benefit the entire player base…
with update .36, why are are you only working on the High level time aspect out of all of these issues that we are concerned about when most of the player base is weighing PQ3’s entertainment value compared to its time consumption and loot rewards
as compared to other games and activities ?
The player base is bleeding… Can you please tell us when will changes be happening ? Can you please tell us what other issues you are working on ?
We would be appreciative of any timely update. Thank you.
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We have been monitoring the data closely and we have not observed a large decline in retention. It can definitely feel that way when players are ‘on the ground’ so to speak, so I apologise for your frustration. However, we can monitor sentiment on the forums and that’s a big part of the job for our customer experience team.
If it wasn’t clear from my earlier post, the issue of time spent is a priority as when too much time is required it can burn players out. We think this is an important issue which is why we are looking into it. @ShomiTheMonkey you mention that players are concerned about the entertainment value VS time consumption and rewards, so looking into time consumption is part of improving the game.
We are also looking into loot rewards and how we can better balance these for player satisfaction. I can’t say more on what the team are doing about this, but it might be some time until we have a concrete solution and it is implemented in game. Unfortunately I am not able to give you firm dates on when changes will be made, as often in game development things shift, schedules change, needs change, and spanners are thrown into the works. What I can say is that we are collating feedback, passing it to the devs, and they are looking into things in the interest of improving the game and player experience.
We are currently working on the 0.37 update which does address a few of the issues the community has raised. I can’t speak too much to these as they are currently being tweaked, but we are looking into resources and some overall balance aspects to help players moving forward.
In the future we are talking about providing very rough roadmaps of what we hope to work on in the future, with the caveat that they may change as the needs of our players change.
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Thank you for the update
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Some talk about removing all animations.
What about adding an animation speed multiplier button like in GoW ?
It had change the world when it was introduced, and I guess (hope) the devs’ team is still able to implement something like that.
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I have had to change all of my loadouts since the update, but it hasn’t helped. Went from winning matches 75% of the time to losing 75% of the time. It sucks. I feel like it is going to be impossible to complete the story line and get to start leveling up a citadel. So, what is the point of playing anymore?
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The time aspect of the game is probably a big piece of why I stepped away from the game. I had said it was related to the lack of progression, but in reality, it is very tied to how long things take to complete now and how little I felt like I was getting back from that time spent. I regularly spent 4-6 hours a day playing the game. More than I probably should. I was having fun though and didn’t have any issue keeping Ruby/Diamond chests running around the clock. Once .36 came online, it was so much harder to keep chests going. More effort. Less rewards for those efforts… and a lot less enjoyment along the way. Couple that with the reality that you must have a Legendary weapon to compete at all in endgame and the fact that there is no way to really evolve your Epic weapons to Legendary… and well, whole lot of frustration. The game really doesn’t offer any features for automating battles or things like that (to save time) other than the dungeon/skirmish tickets, which cost ORE… (I think that dead horse is sufficiently beaten) so yeah, the game essentially offers nothing to shorten time spent drudging through the grind.
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